Few institutions can lay claim to the kind of momentous numbers that San Antonio’s nature, science and culture museum can.
Read more Michelin Guide recognizes 16 San Antonio restaurants. Three retain Michelin stars.
The Witte Museum is turning 100 years old this year with thousands of pieces of art, artifacts and specimens in its collection andmillions of years of scientific discovery.
Founded in 1926 by a San Antonio school teacher, the museum in Brackenridge Park is marking the milestone with two special exhibits and several events its leaders hope will be a memorable celebration for all.
But for the groups of children pressed against the dioramas of wild Texas animals and peering up at skeletal dinosaur mounts on a recent morning, what they’re likely to remember most are the things that made them exclaim, “bro!” in spirited disbelief.
Witte President and CEO Michelle Cuellar Everidge understands.
“I have really vivid memories of Texas Wild … and so I remember walking in and seeing bison in the center ring,” she said of her childhood visits to the museum, with her classmates and with her grandmother, an English teacher.
There were smaller things, too, like placing a coin in the black hole device that demonstrates centrifugal force.
“There were these awe-inspiring moments and these like really fun, hands-on moments that stuck with me,” Everidge said.
Decades later, she’s leading the museum into its next century confident there’s much more to discover and learn.
“It’s not lost on us that this is a very special place, and that it has been able to survive because of so many people’s love and commitment and donations, and really moving the museum forward over time,” Everidge said.
Honoring the museum’s first 100 years is also a springboard to its future, she added.
“Making sure that people know there’s always more to discover, I think, is a part of that longevity of the Witte,” Everidge said. “Making sure that we are serving this generation, teaching them about the place that they live, and also helping them become curious adults and continue to ask questions.”
A place for learning
In fact, the Witte Museum’s beginnings are rooted in teaching. It was a goal of Ellen Schulz Quillin, a botanist and school teacher, to give children access to the natural world.
After raising funds with her students by selling wildflower seeds, Quillin acquired the H.P. Attwater Collection of Natural History collection for $5,000, then enlisted the help of other community leaders to form the San Antonio Museum Association.
Quillin’s students created dioramas for Attwater avian specimens, which would become the first exhibits of the new museum when it opened in 1926.
Those dioramas are now part of two special exhibitions with everything from a kiwi bird, modernist art and a Fiesta gown to a ceramic mask, indigenous cave art, mosasaur skeletons, a juvenile mammoth and a replica of the 49.73-carat diamond stolen during HemisFair ‘68 and never recovered.
“Witte Museum: 100 Years,” will be on display until Jan. 9.
Quillin’s association with the museum is rightly more permanent. Memorialized in the stone entryway arches, her name is carved next to ammonite fossils as a tribute to her legacy as founder and longtime leader of the museum.
Today, the museum annually hosts 60,000 school children, students who are greeted by a life-size model of the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, or Quetzy, which flew over Texas skies 72 million years ago, the largest animal ever to fly. Half of all school field trips are covered by scholarships.
‘A return’ to its founding
About half of the museum’s annual operating budget of $14 million is funded by individual donations, foundations, corporations and government support, and less than half from admissions, memberships, programs, event rentals and other museum activity. About 3% comes from investment income and another 3% from the City of San Antonio.
In its collection, the Witte has 400,000 specimens and growing, and since 2021, is a state and federally certified curatorial collection repository, meaning the museum is qualified to hold items discovered in archeology, paleontology and geology excavations around the world.
But Everidge is proud that the Witte is more than displays and collections.
The museum offers land stewardship programs for youth, leads tours to the White Shaman Preserve it owns near Del Rio, and has a working paleontologist on staff. It has a traveling Black Cowboy exhibit, a showcase of Texas art, and recently opened an exhibit about Texas foods with a mural by San Antonio artist Kat Cadena.
The museum has been around for a century now. But for the Witte, time is not displayed in a linear way — not in its displays nor the way it invites museum-goers to experience nature, science and culture.
Beneath the literal surface are layers that convey how we know what we know about the earliest inhabitants of the state, Everidge explained.
“It opens us up to a lot of storytelling for millions of years and the full geography of Texas, and that’s really how the museum was founded,” she said. “So it’s a return to that first interpretation of what the museum should collect and how it should display its stories.”
Read more ‘We will have growth’: OLLU enrollment falls again as university leaders renew turnaround efforts